The Romanian (11 page)

There are women like her and my mother who spend most of their lives hoping that a miracle will inject the beloved with their image of decency. That's the reason why my mother keeps my serious fiction, written under my real name and so unpalatable to her, out of view, proudly displaying the coffee-table books that I cynically wrote under a pseudonym for quick bucks. This deeply intelligent, somewhat intellectual woman pretends to be perplexed by the fact that I wouldn't put my birth name on those wholesome books and use a pen name for the others.

Every five months, in fact, in the middle of the night during a bout of insomnia, she takes a copy of my novel
User,
about old Times Square, down from the shelf, having conveniently forgotten what it's about. After reading until dawn about the junkies, hustlers and transvestite prostitutes memorialized in its pages, she telephones me in helpless alarm, wanting to know how I could possibly have garnered such information. Then, magically, the subject is forgotten until the next bout of insomnia and rereading several months later.

VIII

MOM'S UNYIELDING INTENTIONS bring up the question of magical thinking and make me question my own impulses. Can vivid wish-fulfillment fantasies of the beloved, motivated even by compassion, produce a miracle and ever change him? The question occurred to me that morning, at the breakfast table with Mom, in the midst of an opiate-withdrawal headache. Would all my longing for Romulus, my good intentions, my fantasies, have the same lack of effect on him that my mother's have had on me?

I worried about this as I lay against the seat that afternoon on the train to Manhattan, in a mood of paranoid yearning, two big tablespoons of hydrocodone flaring into imagined scenarios of Romulus's betrayal. Like a sponge polluted by unclean water, I soaked up pathetic notions that seemed to replay endlessly.

From my mother's I'd used a calling card to telephone him in Sibiu, and he'd mentioned that he was planning to strip for the girls at the club where his brother was a bouncer. It sounded like a harmless idea at first, but snagged my attention, the way a piece of yarn from a sweater catches on a casement nail and has to be worked off slowly in order not to unravel the whole thing. And that afternoon, before the five-and-a-half-hour train ride to New York, I kept trying to clear my throat and couldn't. I remember supposing that a couple spoonfuls of the hydrocodone would relieve it as well as that armored stiffness in my body that came from my mother's expectations.

Slowly, the opiates lulled me into hypnogogic snatches. Made-up stories came into my mind, based on my insecurity about Romulus. Then I'd wake with a start, before sinking back in and finding the same scenarios gone no further in time, waiting to torment me. Romulus was leaning over the balcony of a formerly Communist high-rise in the city of Sibiu to the soft explosions of a beaten rug. It was a few weeks before Easter, so the beaters in this Eastern country, like the ones I'd seen in Arad, were at it probably from morning until dusk. Standing next to him on the balcony was a new blonde. Her blue-veined skin seemed infused with the lead-ridden air, a condition I'd read sometimes occurs in Eastern Europe's overindustrialized cities; from the look of her skin-tight jeans and impossibly clumsy platform heels, she and Romulus were about to go to the club for the striptease he'd mentioned, which suddenly began to overlap . . . that meaningless noise of a beaten rug becoming a musical beat charged with aggressive sex, as brazenly parted legs lowered jeans to reveal pubic hair inches from leering female faces. . . .

The images flared up in a white-hot kiln, then wilted into something taunting and sticky in the mildewed corner of a bedroom—my idea of the bedroom of his apartment in a concrete ex-Communist block. Romulus was gyrating on a bed the way he did during the best times his cock was in my mouth, and into the bedroom came that same mercury-skinned blonde, her rubbery breasts bouncing gently in a harsh shaft of light.

I flailed away from the image and tried to stand, but couldn't unstick myself. Now the dank bedroom featured a nest of undulating hips and slapping thighs, until the train finally pulled into that satanic, rubbery smell of rot that greets you each time you come back to New York, and jerked to a stop.

 

 

LITTLE BY LITTLE I would become amazed at the accuracy of my fantasies as I learned about Romulus's real life in Sibiu, the city to which his family had moved after a decade in the town of Râmnicul-Vîlcea. There really is a mildewed bedroom, similar to the one I imagined. And there really is a bouncer brother, named Bogdan, two years younger than Romulus, who's full of bombast and bullish good humor. He's a big, meaty fellow with a generous, confrontational grin. Then there's the next-younger brother, Vlad, who's blond and tubular as a Russian doll, has a dazed grin, a low IQ and a narcissistic habit of pulling a pocket mirror out of his pants every few steps to examine his hair. Finally, there's sloe-eyed brother Renei, the insular genius of the family, just seventeen, who's discreet and cagey but sweet and depressed. And as for the dilapidated Communist high-rise with the rug beaters, that's pretty much what I found when I actually did visit Sibiu.

Romulus is the darkest and smallest of the children, the oldest, his father an unknown quantity who disappeared into the army after getting Romulus's mother pregnant. Her real fiancé, the father of Romulus's brothers, was himself in the army when the infidelity transpired. When he came home, he found his bride-to-be with a swollen belly. The only way he'd have her was childless, so Romulus was shunted to his maternal grandmother in Sibiu, while the young married couple escaped to the nearby town of Vîlcea.

So Romulus began life thinking that his grandmother was his mother and his mother his sister. All he knew of his real mother, whom he rarely saw, was based on a few of his grandmother's bitter comments about her daughter, “that bitch from Vîlcea.” It wasn't until his little body and judgment had grown capable enough, at, let's say, seven, that his mother realized he had some potential as a babysitter for his three younger half brothers, while she went to her factory job and his stepfather to his construction job. Romulus was shipped from his grandmother's to their home and informed, to his shock, that he was going to live with his real mother.

It was like a fairy tale come to life, when the boy was suddenly banished by a doting grandmother to a strange town to work for a beleaguered woman whom he had heard called a villain for the last seven years. Here in Râmnicul-Vîlcea, he had his first practice as a fugitive, an émigré, slipping out of windows while the family slept (he couldn't walk past the kitchen, where his stepfather lay in bed next to the gas stove) and sneaking onto the train back to Sibiu. Then the child's ability to play became an ability to plot, for he had to play at playing, skipping from train car to train car until he found a couple who looked like they could be respectable parents, and loitering near them with the false expression of a normal boy having fun, until the conductor was out of the way. This sham of normalcy would soon develop into a major conning skill, but it didn't keep them from sending him back to his mother again and again, until he got used to it and learned to see life through that veil of blood that some call family and that ties one abject relative, or hostage of a situation, to another, encouraging him to view the rest of the world in a pitiless or predatory way.

All of which must have somehow struck me as we said good-bye at the Gellért, and I watched him walk farther and farther away, his back slightly stooped, carrying the five hundred dollars I'd given him, which was more than five times the average monthly salary for a Romanian. From my departing taxi I watched his rather bow-legged stride across the bridge toward a bus that would take him back to the place of his old confinement—his mother's house. Like many people of his ilk, he would spend most of his time merely waiting, his coiled muscles set at bay in front of a TV, smoking cigarette after cigarette, eyes ringed with boredom and insulted sensitivity. Waiting and always waiting, that's how it was. Waiting for the time with me to be over so he could see a girl, waiting for the girl to be over so that he could start waiting for me all over again and get some money. It certainly was one more aspect of him that excited me: his talent for submission. Perhaps I should have remembered that he was also known for bolting, onto trains and across borders.

Given his background, he may have been prone to plotting. Even out of idleness. Several times I put myself in his situation, trying to see myself through his eyes as someone who could never be kind enough no matter what I did, unless I were to relinquish all my power—in the form of money and freedom. I saw him crouched before the TV in the living room of his mother (who had now moved back to Sibiu), predatorily questioned by the whole family. What, really, did this educated American who was twice his age and had so much more money want from him? I saw them drilling like miners toward the mother lode of our sex acts, and his embarrassment and swift realization when they hit a vein, so that it was more than easy to draft him into their plan of exploitative outrage, their fraudulent project to right the corruption that had been visited on their son, by setting up some kind of sting.

Homosexuality is no longer illegal in Romania per se. In 1996, under pressure from the then forty-nation Council of Europe, the country amended the language of its sodomy law, known as Article 200. Formerly, the law forbade homosexuality in all situations; but at the time of my most intense involvement with Romulus it still called for prosecution in cases of a “public scandal.” Because the term “public scandal” is so vague, it can mean anything from having sex in a public toilet to forgetting to close the curtains as you kiss your partner good morning. And because the law explicitly condemns proselytizing for the legitimacy of homosexuality, it could undoubtedly be brought to bear on anyone thought to have corrupted another into a homosexual relationship.

In the mid-nineties, the prosecution of the homosexual lifestyle in Romania was grisly. Police in towns and small cities sometimes offered the most flagrant queen amnesty in exchange for helping them hunt out more closety homosexuals. Or else the information came from a family member. A well-known case is one from 1992 involving Ciprian Cucu, who was in his last year of high school, and Marian Mutascu, who was twenty-two.
¹
The young men, who met through a coded newspaper ad published in Timişoara, lived in the town of Sînnicolau Mare, with Cucu's family. Their love affair was intense and secret. But Cucu's sister and her husband began to suspect, and when the sister discovered Cucu's revealing diary, she went for the only help she could think of—the police. During the interrogation, Cucu denied everything, but Mutascu confessed. The police confronted the “whore Cucu,” as they termed him, with the diary, and he, too, broke down.

Trying to establish without a doubt who was the active and who the passive partner—which the prosecutor and the forensic doctor insisted were essential to the case—the interrogators forced Cucu and Mutascu to undergo painful examinations of their genital and rectal areas. Finally, after pressure from Amnesty International and the Romanian Helsinki Committee, the two were released and given suspended sentences. But by then, both had served jail time. Mutascu was suffering from a severe skin infection that had erupted on his legs. Cucu was banished from high school and not allowed to finish his last year. The reason was ostensibly too many absences, but he later learned it was because his lifestyle was considered an unhealthy influence. Mutascu committed suicide.

In a few of my many fantasies about Romulus, I'd considered the possibility of blackmail. I'd heard accounts of it in the gay world now and then. A few American gays had been subject to extortion by ex-members of the Communist secret police, in regions where draconian laws against homosexuality were still in effect. What would happen, I remember wondering, if Romulus's impoverished parents persuaded him to set up a bogus police sting with a local former member of the Securitate? The fake charge could be propositioning and sexual corruption of a citizen. Like Cucu and Mutascu, I might be beaten and held in a deserted barracks, while Romulus played innocent, explaining to me that the only way to get out of this was to have my traumatized mother wire huge sums of money.

However, this fantasy wasn't connected in my mind with any moral defect on Romulus's part. It had become all too clear to me that there's a kind of person who by some historical accident is born into a mess, which leads, paradoxically, to more and more messes of the person's own making, for him and for those around him. Finally, I was aware that just a glimpse into such dead-end trajectories can brand the heart of an outsider like me and lead to all sorts of entanglements. Society is structured to prevent the toxic effect of any meaningful contact with these people. But once you've crossed over, there isn't any turning back from that reality.

 

 

EVEN SO, each time these worries came up, they would drown again in the sea of my passion. I'd all but forget them, immersed instead in schemes to get to Romania, to create a future for Romulus by getting him some money or to make my mother or friends understand or even envy my passion. My blinding visions and sudden eclipses were like Coleridge's on opium as I skated from idealized fantasies of perverse bliss with Romulus to demoralized concoctions of betrayal. My dream worlds had no logical connection to one another, unless it was the connection between polar opposites, inexplicable joy and sudden fear. Shuttling from one state to the next, I'd squeamishly shade my eyes from the light of a Manhattan street, or close them against the sun coming into my bedroom window. On damp sheets, my body twitched with memories of our past encounters and visions of our future. Despite the dysfunctional state of things, and despite the current normalizing politics engulfing culture, I still saw my homosexuality as a narrative of adventure, a chance to cross not only sex barriers but class barriers, while breaking a few laws in the process. Otherwise, I told myself, I might as well be straight.